


tides, they turn, and hearts disfigure

by piratekelly



Series: what a beautiful mess this is [1]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Feelings, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Introspection, Loneliness, M/M, Past Love, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2016-08-10
Packaged: 2018-08-07 19:59:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7727887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piratekelly/pseuds/piratekelly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve McGarrett is not, by nature, a morning person.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tides, they turn, and hearts disfigure

**Author's Note:**

> Was having a rough night dealing with some stuff, channeled it into fic. It's entirely unbeta'd, so all mistakes are my own. Title comes from Jason Mraz's "A Beautiful Mess". Maybe someday I'll make it a full-fledged fic. Comments are love.

Steve catches a lot of flack from his team for all the working out he does every day before he comes into the office. It’s really rich, coming from Kono and Chin, who get up with the sun more often than not just to go surfing before the tourists clog the pipeline. So what if Steve has a steady rotation of reliable workouts before he even eats breakfast? His head is never clearer than it is after a two mile swim in the cool morning water of the Pacific. So few things in his life are reliable anymore; most days the only thing he knows will come back to him at the end of the day is the ebb and flow of the ocean tide meeting the beach. Back and forth. See and saw. Leave and return.

 

Danny simply suggests that Steve subjects himself to strenuous exercise because he doesn’t love himself. After all, who runs five miles on the beach before 7am when they could enjoy another hour of sleep? Steve just chuckles quietly and waves his partner off. The problem has never been that Steve doesn’t love himself; he’s learned how to, out of necessity, over the last few years.

 

He’s had to because with every passing day he feels more and more like he’s the only one who does.

 

xxxx

 

Steve McGarrett is not, by nature, a morning person. Once upon a time he enjoyed sleeping in, even longed for lazy Sundays spent in his boxers, watching mindless TV, forgetting that things like responsibilities existed. But then the Navy happened, and one of the first lessons they instilled in him was that a day that started after 0600 was considered to be a wasted one. He’s been done with the Navy for years now, has had many opportunities to fall back into the comforts of lazy civilian practices, but a morning spent exercising his body into near exhaustion is better than one spent staring at the empty side of his bed and wondering when it went from being a treasured place to a fault line keeping lovers one inch away from calling it home.

 

xxxx

 

He runs a sixth mile the next morning. He tells himself that this is the only thing he needs his body to remember. What he wants is for his body to forget.

 

xxxx

 

Most people enjoy the occasional rainy day in Hawaii. It means a break from the sweltering heat, a few hours without sunscreen and sweat, culminating in the promise of a rainbow kissing the horizon in the aftermath. 

 

Steve, on the other hand, hates the rain.

 

Rain means he can’t run, can’t swim, can’t push his body to its limits before taking on the day. It means that he spends the morning in bed, awake and staring at the ceiling long before his alarm is set to go off, lost in thoughts of what could have been. His eyes are dry from watching the ceiling fan twirl above him, frantic like the thoughts swirling in his mind. He’s reminded, once again, why he never indulges in these long mornings in bed anymore. He only ever does them when he’s not alone, when there’s a reason to stay put, to stop for a while and just exist in the moment. But if there’s one thing Steve has learned in his life, it’s that moments exist solely to be looked back on with longing.

 

He closes his eyes and sighs, turning onto his side to face the empty space next to him.

 

Before he can even open his eyes he can feel the phantom touch of a finger caressing the apple of his cheek, brushing the curve of his upper lip as it travels down to tangle with the fingers of Steve’s hand, resting next to his head on the pillow. Remembers the solid touch of a hand on his hip, pulling him back into the warm, broad chest of a body long forgotten, one that had once held him with such care only to be left to the Earth without so much as a word of goodbye. 

 

He aches, feels it in his chest like a physical weight and wonders why he’s subjecting himself to this. Getting lost in the things he doesn’t have anymore never does him any good. It leaves him feeling adrift, empty in a way he never wants to feel again. Moments like these are why he runs away from his bed in the morning, why he swims far enough out that the only thing that touches him is salt water and the ocean breeze. 

 

He wonders, before drifting back into sleep, if sense memory was always meant to feel like such a curse.

 

xxxx

 

He dreams of mornings spent curled around a warm body, the smell of Catherine’s coconut shampoo filling his nostrils, the heavy weight of Freddie’s chest underneath his ear, the gentle beat of a heart that had enough room for him to take up space in it. He dreams because memories are too hard, imagines because reality leaves him feeling cold and alone, completely unmoored in these moments where he has nothing to anchor him in the present. He tries not to remember the last time he wrapped his arms around someone he loved, only to wake to find them empty again. He dreams so that he can trick himself into believing these things were never real. The desires of the subconscious are always easier to write off than the longing of a lonely heart. 

 

Steve opens his eyes and stares at the empty side of his bed. He’s had many partners sleep there, women and men, people who weren’t Catherine or Freddie, but rather people just passing through on vacation, lonely souls at the bar looking for someone to share in a need to feel less alone, just for a little while. Once upon a time these ships in the night encounters between his sheets, those few hours of nothing and no one to think about but what he was doing with the person there pressed up against him, sweaty from exertion and the humid air filling the room. On those nights, he doesn’t have to wonder if he’ll wake up alone the next day.

 

Somehow, knowing that he  _ will _ makes it...not easier, but maybe less painful.

 

Steve looks at the empty side of his bed. The sheets are mussed from where he tossed and turned in his sleep. Some mornings he wakes to find that he’s reached out in the night, hand resting in an open space where no one has been for a long time. He stares and wonders when someone will stay long enough to fill it again.

 

xxxx

 

He goes out later that day and buys a punching bag. Hangs it up in the garage, just feet away from the Mercury,  and runs through combinations of kicks and hits until his body feels like a wet noodle.

 

He’s too tired to dream that night.

 

xxxx

 

Nothing changes, except that he learns to live with that emptiness. Doesn’t let it surround him anymore. He fills his life with other things: teaching Grace to surf, taking Kono to the base just to watch her pull off increasingly difficult shots and putting everyone else to shame, meeting with Chin to go spearfishing when they have an afternoon off. He Skypes with Mary and Joan, calls Deb and her husband just to check in, makes an effort to root himself in the things he does have instead of living with the things he doesn’t.

 

Over time, the deep chasm in his chest starts to pull itself closed.

 

xxxx

 

Six months later, Steve wakes up to a knock on his door. Mumbling, he pulls himself out of bed, wondering who could be knocking at his door at this hour on a Saturday. The knocking is insistent, and loud, and very insistent, and Steve looks through the peephole, ready to tell whoever it is to fuck off and come back at a decent hour. Instead, he stills. Leans back. Wipes the sleep from his eyes and checks again.

 

And again.

 

And a fourth time for good measure.

 

“McGarrett, are you gonna open the door or not?”

 

Steve smiles. Somehow, he feels like he should have known Danny would be the one on the other side.

 

He opens the door.

 

xxxx

 

(Later, when he’s coming down from the adrenaline high of a run well executed, Danny’s chattering a pleasant hum in the background, he’ll realize it was actually 9am when he crawled out of bed, and laugh. He slept in, and the day feels far from wasted. In fact, he thinks it’s somehow just getting started.

 

Better late than never, he supposes.)


End file.
